Those are two different issues: you're conflating the issue of females who want to fight being allowed to do so with the issue of females who don't want to fight being allowed to refrain from doing so -- a right they have that males do not. What reason, other than hypocrisy, could feminists have for consistently leaving that latter particular aspect of equal rights out?

"We want to be equal except where being unequal suits us" is not an argument that would advance the cause.

(Note: I'm in favor of women having equal rights... in all cases.)

On the contrary, if you try to bend a sword along the flat side of its blade (the weak axis) it'll flex easily. As an example, the fancy sword in the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon visibly vibrated just from being swung around in the air.

Now, if you apply force to it on edge -- such as by using it to cut something -- then it will be very stiff, but that's because it's also very thick along that axis.

Indeed -- Apple would get better bang for their buck (or rather, stiffness for their thickness) by increasing the thickness of the material forming the sides of the case rather than the back... but it would still be less effective than increasing the overall depth of the device while leaving the case thickness the same.

It's (mostly) not the material, it's the geometry. The bending modulus of any material depends on the cube of its thickness. Making something both thin and rigid is disproportionately hard, no matter what material you make it out of.

"Lets leave them a world of energy starvation and poverty!"

Indeed, that is what would happen if we don't develop sustainable infrastructure!

I assume that a pistol would be much easier to smuggle than a nuclear bomb.

[A] single rich man's yacht can literally motor right up the Chesapeake and detonate a bomb capable of wiping out DC without ever touching american soil and thus not subject to any nuclear scans or customs searches.

Sure, customs wouldn't bother scanning the yacht, but that's because the CIA would have intervened before it even got anywhere near the US.

One or two nukes will not make much; even one nuke per US major city (1-5k) will probably not make Africa or Australia inhabitable.

Subtle troll is subtle. Well done.

I guess I should have linked the New Jersey landfall update instead of the "Sandy becomes post-tropical" update. The landfall update claims sustained winds of 80 mph, which is well within the category 1 hurricane range.

Everyone on the planet (or in orbit, for that matter) has those rights. It's just that some people live in jurisdictions whose government fails to recognize them.

"Superstorm"* Sandy

* So named because it wasn't even strong enough to count as a real hurricane...

On the contrary, Sandy was a category 2 hurricane when it made landfall on Cuba. Moreover, it still had hurricane-force winds when it made landfall in New Jersey; the only reason it wasn't called a "hurricane" was that it was post-tropical. In other words, it was as severe as a hurricane, but a different kind of storm.

It would be the government is now regulating the actual traffic on the internet

You are a liar, doing nothing but spreading FUD.

Regulating ISPs as Common Carriers would "regulate the actual traffic on the Internet" exactly as much as regulating phone companies as Common Carriers censors the content of telephone calls -- which is to say, not in the slightest.

Who are the stakeholders? Well, let's see:

• Telcos
• "Big Data" Internet companies
• the FCC
• the Public

Only one of these "stakeholders" have opinions that actually matter, and that stakeholder sent "a groundswell of 3 million citizen comments, most of them, presumably, against the FCC's approach" [and in support of regulating ISPs as Common Carriers].

I think we're done here.

In your foaming response, please describe _exactly_ what you find so objectionable about the Affordable Care Act.... If you have corporate health insurance, describe exactly how the ACA affected your coverage.

My problem with the ACA is that it failed to end employer-provided health insurance, which serves to do exactly nothing except make it harder to change jobs.

My health insurance is paid 100% by my employer. My wife's insurance is paid 50% by my employer. However, as I understand it, because my employer offers health insurance for my wife, she's not eligible for the subsidized rate she would otherwise get for an exchange-based plan. I'm reasonably certain that the 50% of the premiums we pay is more than a subsidized ACA plan would cost, but less than an unsubsidized one would cost, so we're forced to overpay for the "privilege" of having a "choice."

What the ACA should have done is let employers wishing to offer health benefits pay into a FSA or HSA-like account, which the employee could use to pay the premium of the insurance plan of his choosing.

Someone who can blame Obamacare on Republicans is someone who can blame anything on them.

First of all, Obamacare is the Republicans' fault. You can tell because A) they liked it when it was called Romneycare, and B) it's a shit solution (compared to "single payor" where said payor is either the government (i.e., a socialist solution) or the individual patient (i.e., a libertarian solution)) that only serves to entrench and enrich the middlemen. The Democrats would have designed a much more socialist program had they not been trying to appease the Republicans.

Second, your claim is a fallacy. There is absolutely no reason why, just because Obamacare is legitimately the Republicans' fault, that any of the other stupid shit Obama and/or the Democrats have done could be also. For example, here's a partial list of things for which the Republicans can not be blamed:

• Treasonous NSA totalitarianism after 2009 (just because Congress passed a bill that purports to authorize and fund it, doesn't mean Obama, as Commander-in-Chief, actually has to do it. He could have unilaterally ended it 5 seconds after being inaugurated but didn't, and that's entirely on him.)
• Parallel construction after 2009 (a concept entirely made up by the executive branch, as far as I know)
• Benghazi and most other foreign-policy screwups since 2009
• IRS scandal
• the Obamacare website (note: distinct from Obamacare itself)
• etc.